A Welsh farmer is reaping the benefits of Barenbrug’s Ensign Duet, having taken an impressive four cuts of very high-quality silage since reseeding his field last spring.
Barrie Evans – also a local rep for NWF – found himself short of grass the previous year, so decided to reseed with the specialist forage grass seed breeder’s Ensign Duet, which combines Crusader, Alice and Barblanca white clovers with 66 percent Lemmon red clover for rapid nitrogen fixation for new leys.
"I wanted to get better quality grasses into the field, so decided to try Ensign Duet after using Barenbrug seed years ago and being impressed," he reveals. "I reseeded in April and took my first cut just six or seven weeks later. It was brilliant quality – there wasn’t a weed in the field. By October I’d taken a further three cuts."
The silage is fed to son James’ herd of award-winning pedigree Jersey cows, which produces 6,500 litres of milk per cow. "The silage is proving very palatable with the herd, which milked very well over the winter. And it’s no wonder – the silage is high quality with an excellent protein score of 16.5, which is well above average. It’s also got a good dry matter content – there’s not one figure that’s weak."
Barenbrug’s agricultural product manager David Long says that Barry will continue to benefit from this very high-yielding ley. "Red clovers establish and fix nitrogen better than white clovers in the first two years of a new sward, but lack the persistency of white clovers. And so by combining the two clover types, Ensign Duet feeds the sward effectively throughout its productive life; as the red clover starts to weaken, the white has developed strongly and spreads through the sward, and so is in the ideal position to replace it."
Barrie concludes: "With the cost of fertiliser and seed going up you need something that will grow. I’m looking forward to getting equally impressive results this year."
